First there were the earmarks. Now, a reminder that often, some of those earmarks are worse than we thought - they continue funding of expensive defense procurement projects that the Department of Defense itself says are obsolete or nonfunctional.
It's the "old" politics. It's well entrenched in Congress, not just among Republicans, as we've discussed previously, but equally among Democrats.
Side Note: the linked article above suggests that Dems do more of this than Reps - by $524 million to "only" $300 million - it's a weak claim; by these numbers, Democrats are responsible for 63% of the total - about the same percentage of seats that they hold in Congress (58%).
By clinging to their rights to earmark, and wasting money on obsolete projects, senior members of both parties have fully declared their allegiance to the "old" politics. These practices amount to nothing more than spending the government's money outside appropriate decision channels, in ways Congress wouldn't approve if it were being done by bank execs, or the directors of some charitable foundation.
Personally, I'm not certain that Congress could function without some form of earmark spending (see here). But the practice threatens to burgeon out of control, and continuing unneeded procurement, is particularly indefensible. Surely some attempts to abolish or eliminate this conscious waste are in order. For that, we should look to the Democrats, who have a strong majority in Congress as well as a President of their party who has argued for change.
Pelosi, Reid, and other Democratic leaders in Congress point out correctly that they don't work for the President. They're even claiming now that their entitlements are actually good government. They deceive themselves, however, if they think their present and future status as elected representatives is independent of the President. Certainly these Congressional kingpins and queenpins would have been reelected without Obama. They may dismiss his campaign promises as rhetoric, or feel the specifics didn't matter because (being honest, now) any Democrat could have been elected in the wake of the unpopular Bush and the terrible economic news of late 2008.
But one part of Obama's message that clearly caught on with many, including younger voters, was his campaign against the "old" way of doing business. Democrats in Congress can either embrace that idea and lead the process of bipartisan reform, or ignore it and hope it will go away. If grassroots antipathy toward the old politics is as strong as it appears to be, the second course of action combined with overzealous insistence on a "liberal" program of government, could lead them in two years to the minority status the Republicans now hold.
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